2/14/2006 @ 12:00PM

Why The Rich Live Longer

The rich really are different, and it’s not that they’re soft in the places where others are hard. It’s that they’re alive after poorer people are dead.

Reams of data indicate that wealth and success stave off death. Scientists are still trying to figure out why, publishing as many as 400 papers a month on the problem. Certainly, everyone agrees, there are huge health benefits to not being dirt-poor: clean drinking water, good medical care and safe housing, to name a few. And taking care of those basic needs causes a steep rise in life expectancy. No one denies it’s better to live in a penthouse in New York, treated by a Park Avenue doctor, than in a slum in an impoverished Third World country. Another explanation is that healthier people simply make more money.

But one vocal group of researchers says the problem has nothing to do with material comfort at all. Instead, it is the mental stress of being less wealthy than our peers that kills us.

Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neuroscientist and author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, has pointed out that the difference can mean a poor white male is likely to die a decade sooner than his wealthy counterpart. He points to the Whitehall Study, a giant 20-year study of British civil servants conducted by Sir Michael Marmot of University College, London.

All of the people in the Whitehall study had access to universal medical care, and none were impoverished. Still, there was a substantial difference between the life spans of junior and senior civil servants. Those who made more money, or who had attained higher rank, lived substantially longer. Midlevel administrators did better than porters–even after risky behaviors like smoking and drinking were accounted for.

Richard Wilkinson of Nottingham University argues that the really important difference is not how much money one makes but how your bank account compares with your neighbor’s. Some U.S. states, he says, are twice as rich as others but don’t have better health. But in areas where the income disparity is largest, his most recent studies have found a litany of health differences. In these areas, people tend to be fatter. Teen pregnancies are more common, too, as are homicides.

Other measures of status and success seem to have an effect as well. Oscar-winning directors and actors live longer than their non-award-winning thespian counterparts, according to researchers at the University of Toronto. The effect doesn’t hold for Oscar-winning screenwriters–which probably says a lot about the Hollywood-status totem pole.

The idea that health problems are exacerbated by psychological stress caused by being less wealthy than others is particularly appealing to researchers like Sapolsky, who has spent much of his career doing primate research. That is because our closest animal relatives–monkeys and chimps–live and die based on their place in the pecking order. Carol Shively, who studies rhesus monkeys at Wake Forest University, says the dominant monkeys live longer, even when access to resources is controlled. Shively also found that if monkeys were forced to change their position in the hierarchy, they all died early. The stress of the change was too much for them.

Some of these effects are downright eerie. Female monkeys whose ovaries are removed are at high risk for endometrial cancer, and alcohol consumption makes the risk worse. But in a recent study, Shively found that monkeys with low social status were more likely to develop cancer than those that were given alcohol.

Still, some critics say material goods are the most likely culprit. George Kaplan, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, says Wilkinson’s psychological status argument “is to my mind completely discredited.” He points out that the benefits of having money can be much greater than simply having better health care or food. After taking a jet plane across the Atlantic, a businessman who flew in first class feels better than one who flew in coach. But that’s because he got plenty of leg room, a good meal, free drinks and plenty of sleep. You can explain the better health of the guy in first class without resorting to his psychological superiority to the schlubs in coach.

Unfortunately, the data sources are bad enough that it will be very difficult to settle this argument conclusively. For one thing, most surveys of income cap out at an annual salary that puts the average Forbes reader in the same wealth category as
Larry
Ellison
Larry Ellison
.

One living experiment:
Bill
Gates
Bill Gates
and John McCaw. Both are white, male, residents of Seattle and of similar age (49 and 54). Both are self-made successes. Both are members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. But Gates is worth $51 billion, whereas McCaw has a mere $900 million. So Gates should live longer, right?